How female farmers are staking their claims to land

Alice Kachere lived and worked on a farm in rural Malawi with her husband until he died in 2002.

He left her with three young children, but without a legal title or any other right to the house and farm that sheltered and sustained them. His parents claimed the property and evicted Kachere and her children.

Kachere and the children went to live with her parents on their farm in central Malawi, where she had first started working the land as a girl.

She went back to work on the farm and, stung by her in-laws’ land grab, became an advocate for women’s land rights.

In 2007, when her own father died, she knew the fate of his land was in jeopardy. Neither she nor her mother would automatically inherit it, but her advocacy experience had taught her to fight for it.

Although the country has embarked on a reform of its land tenure policies, rural land in Malawi is often still governed by traditions and customs, and controlled by the local chief.

Kachere went to discuss her father’s land with the chief, and he awarded her one hectare (about 2.5 acres) of the land, with a demand that she improve its quality.

She was thrilled.

“You can’t do farming or anything without land,” she said on a panel discussing women and land rights during the two-week United Nations’ 59th Commission on the Status of Women, which ends on Friday.

“Because I have land, now I am practicing conservation agriculture,” she said, noting she is improving the soil by planting trees, rotating crops and applying manure as fertiliser.

Toiling on the land with only a hoe, Kachere grows maize, soy and ground nuts, of which she sells half and her family consumes the rest.

“My household is uplifted. Instead of one tonne, I’m harvesting 15 to 20 tonnes per year,” she said of her crops.

The chief also has assured her that, although there is no formal title, the land will be inherited by her son and two daughters and she already has divided it into three equal portions, she said.

By having a recognised stake on the land, Kachere knows she is one of the more fortunate female farmers in Africa.

“They produce more than 80 percent of the food in Africa but own only 1 percent of the land,” she said.

Globally, it is estimated is that rural women do 66 percent of the farm work, produce 50 percent of the food and earn 10 percent of the income, but own between 1 and 2 percent of the land, said Lynn Brown, an expert who advises the World Bank and the CGIAR Consortium, a global agricultural research partnership.

In many parts of the world, women are not permitted to own land, and land rights are automatically passed on to men and boys, not women and girls.

In the Philippines, until about three years ago, a married woman’s name never even appeared on a land title, according to Ireneo Cerilla, a farmer and president of PAKISAMA, a confederation of small farming and fishery organisations in the Philippines.

Sometimes the biggest obstacle facing a woman seeking a land title is not discrimination but the fact that that there is no land title in the modern legal sense, said Brown.

“We think all land is owned, but not all land is owned. It’s customary land or owned by the state,” she said.

Even when women do have a land title, they often don’t know their rights, Brown said.

Kachere is now an advocate with the World Farmers Organisation’s women’s committee, educating other women about their rights and pushing to increase their access to agricultural education extension services and to markets.

“Women can do it,” she said.

This article is published in collaboration with The Thomson Reuters Foundation. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Lisa Anderson is the North America correspondent for the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

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